According to Lenin, the famine killing millions was the perfect moment to execute clergy by the thousands.

When the Bolsheviks took power, they nationalized every church and banned religious teaching after 9 centuries as Russia’s state religion.

In 1922, he ordered mass executions while troops fired on believers resisting confiscations in Shuya, and an estimated 8,000 priests were killed that year alone. Patriarch Tikhon excommunicated them, got arrested, and signed a loyalty pledge to avoid the same fate before dying in 1925.

After the monasteries turned into camps, fewer than 500 of 54,000 churches stayed open by 1939. For Lenin any loyalty outside the state, whether property, courts, or the Church, counted as a threat that had to be destroyed.

🄳🄾🄾🄼🄿🤖🅂🅃🄸🄽🄶